I suspect that most men above a certain age suffer particular anxieties about getting their hair cut, fearing a moment when the barber points out that there's been less and less to tend to over time. I'm quite fortunate that this isn't a problem at my age - quite the opposite, in fact. Pat, my tiny Italian barber, tells me with such frequency that I have so much hair that I'm starting to worry it's more than an observation. Unlike my thinning-haired brethren, my anxiety is that my barber is fed up with the work volume I bring him each month. I'm slowing the process down. The man is in his 80s. He's getting too old for this. This is Pat's heavily-accented way of gently telling me, "paisan, you have too much hair."
I haven't seen Pat since February, and I've worried about his wellbeing. He tells me often that work gives him purpose (and money) to fill his time between trips back home to the Amalfi coast. He is also, of course, right in the target zone for a pandemic of this magnitude. Pat is sort of back to work from what I hear, but the stress and effort involved with seeing him have outweighed my desire to do so. And therefore, as I sit here in my seventh month of quarantine, it is time that we talk about my hair.
When I was little, it was long, loosely wound, and blonde. It darkened over time into a deep, rich brown, with light streaks of blonde still slipping in. If I ever spent any time outside during the summer, it would lighten again, but alas, I am an indoor kid, so it's always been this really nice brown. I like the color, if I'm honest. It will be bittersweet to see it fade someday.
When it's closely cropped, it is straight and airy. It doesn't lay on my head like a mop or a mat - it always has just a little spring to it, even when it's short. But catch me 4-5 weeks after a haircut, and it's all bounce and curls and the obvious way to pin me for being of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. When I got back my DNA results from Ancestry, it included a rather surprising letter that read, "Ari, you idiot, why did you just spend $100 figuring out something you can see every time you look in the mirror? Oh well, here's your 100% result: Jewish, Eastern European."
The curls are also a topic of conversation with Pat at nearly every haircut. "You hair is so curly," Pat says to me. It makes me feel precious and childlike - a feeling he undoes nearly every time with the next line. "Thank God it's so straight when we get it this short." As much as it kinda stings, Pat gets me. He confirms my self-bias. I don't know why, but I've always felt that I'm better suited for shorter hair.
It's been probably 30 weeks since I've seen Pat - that's six missed haircuts. Houston, we have a problem. I don't know what I'm doing, and YouTube videos are absolutely no help. Please send a better hairbrush.
It has simply grown out of control. But everyone keeps telling me they dig it, so I smile, and I feign agreement when in my head, I am screaming, "Can't you see this madness? My head is being engulfed by an invasion that I simply can not stop!" The top is all curls, the sides…cotton candy…and the back recently reached out to FEMA, and frankly, they're stumped.
In the before times, my hair needed a quick once-through with a brush, once or twice a day, and I was ready to go. Now, we have round-the-clock inspections, and a battalion of headbands, elastics, clasps, and clips to keep it in line. And it was during one of these routine nighttime combings that I recently discovered my hair had finally reached its final Jewfro form when combed out all the way. My immediate thought: this aggression will not stand, man.
Running my brush through it last night, wet, slick, and just out of the shower, I convinced myself to try something different, and for a brief moment, it worked. Everything lay so nicely, and it all fit together. The units had coalesced into one corps. But in that intermission, I also saw a vision of myself I've never seen, a me with longer hair, straighter, and more relaxed. The Vermont-hippie Ari, with a gentler face framed by softer hair. Suffice it to say, I was quite disoriented.
What makes this time so unique is that it has wholly obliterated our comfort zones and necessitated a constant reinvention of the norm. As scary as that is - and it is scary - it's also wildly inspiring. Comfort zones are comfortable, but they are terrible when it comes to self-growth. Before all of this, I never desired to grow out my hair just to see what would happen. This decision would probably never have arrived organically, but I'm learning now to see that this time presents us with many ways to embrace the never was, or the never will be, with a different mentality: but what if?
With all of its past obsessions and present anxieties, my hair has reminded me of an important lesson about mindfulness: resisting the moment is a surefire way to suffer through it. It's only when we embrace our presence in the moment that we can encourage ourselves to keep growing.